


Around the World and Back Again

by saltstreets



Category: Football RPF
Genre: German National Team, Long Distance Bothering, M/M, Nostalgia, Retirement
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-21
Updated: 2017-10-21
Packaged: 2019-01-17 10:35:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,458
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12363828
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/saltstreets/pseuds/saltstreets
Summary: Bastian’s always been overwhelmed by how generous Lukas is with him, right from when they were kids. He makes friends easily in general but Lukas had just slipped himself right under Bastian’s skin from day one and hadn’t let himself get dislodged by the intervening years.





	Around the World and Back Again

**Author's Note:**

  * For [doubtthestars](https://archiveofourown.org/users/doubtthestars/gifts).



> Lovely recip, I hope you enjoy this! I'm never going to stop being emotional about the fairytale that is schweinski and their perfect international career paths, so this was a nice way for me to get out some of those feelings. (Not all of them, I don't think I'll _ever_ manage that.)
> 
> sidenote for clarification: It's never made explicit in the fic or even delved into in any detail at all but this is an open relationship situation with Monika and Ana, because Lukas's canon dream of having a big joint family with a shared garden is just too good to pass up on by going down the 'wives just not there' route.

 

 

Bastian calls Lukas because he’s caught in a moment of sudden thrilling shock at what’s going on and he feels like a kid again. He feels like a kid and he wants his best friend.

He also has to admit that he likes having news. At some point way back in time when they were young and stupid(er), it had become their little unspoken agreement, almost a ritual, that the other would always be the first to know about the big things, and Lukas was always confiding in him the latest twist or turn in his career. Some of those calls had been excited, Lukas practically bouncing on the other end of the line, and some had been distressed affairs, but the point remained that it was Lukas doing the most of that calling. Hell, not two weeks ago Bastian’s dinner had been interrupted by Lukas insistently ringing his number only to shout “JAPAN!” when Bastian had finally picked up. He’s happy that Lukas is content with the journeyman character his life has taken on, but it’s nice to be able get his own back.

He hadn’t phoned before going to Manchester in a fit of dramatics but now he waits until he knows Lukas will just be sitting at the table with whatever club-sanctioned meal he’s going to choke down for dinner and calls.

Lukas is actually eating when he picks up. “Basti?”

“Are you talking with your mouth full?”

There’s an audible swallow before Lukas says, too-clearly, “Never.”

“You’re so gross.”

“No you,” Lukas fires back easily. “What’s up?”

Bastian savours the words before he says them. “How do you feel about the United States?”

He can hear the gears clicking into place as Lukas makes the inference. “America?!”

“America!”

Lukas whoops and shouts some excitable phrases in English that don’t really anything to do with anything (highlights including a complicated pizza order and half the lyrics to a Kanye song that Bastian can’t remember the name of) and they jump around in their separate homes until Ana comes in to ask what’s going on, and if she needs to call the fire brigade.

 

 

\--

 

The last piece of news that Bastian had shared with Lukas, he hadn’t even managed to say. Or rather, it’s more accurate that he hadn’t _needed_ to say. They’d been in Lukas’s hotel room, watching some confusing documentary on Arte with the window open, letting the warm Parisian chatter drift in on the evening air. They were trying to throw and catch almonds in their mouths when Lukas had said, quite out of nowhere, “You’re going to retire after the tournament, aren’t you?”

Bastian had choked on his last almond. Lukas had pounded him sympathetically on the back until he could breathe again.

“Well?”

“How’d you guess,” Bastian had said, somewhat guiltily. He had really meant to tell Lukas himself, but he hadn’t even really decided. It had only been a notion, lingering uncomfortably at the back of his mind for some weeks now, unsure if it was welcome in his head. Or ever would be welcome.

“Just the way you’ve been acting. The way you were talking about the captaincy to Thomas the other day. It just sounded like you knew.”

Bastian had fidgeted with the blue and gold patterned duvet. “I don’t really.”

“But you’ve been thinking about it.”

“Yeah. A lot. I mean- I have to, right? Haven’t you?”

“I suppose,” Lukas had said thoughtfully. “In an abstract way.” He’d grinned at Bastian then. “Should we go together? Make a pact? We started this and now we’re going to end it?”

“God, that sounds about a hundred times more dramatic than it needs to be.”

“It’s our _lives,_ Basti, if we can’t go out with a bang then what can we do?!”

“Go out quietly? With no trouble?”

“You sound so hopeful. Don’t kid yourself. We’ll go lifting that trophy high, you know we will.” Lukas had grabbed him by the shoulders. “It’s our destiny, Schweini!”

Bastian had snorted, had hit him with a pillow, and Germany had gone out to France in the semi-finals.

 

 

\--

 

 

Bastian watches Lukas’s final match with the national team from his living room in Manchester, sprawled on the sofa which is one of the dwindling pieces of furniture still in his flat. The move to Chicago had only been made public the day before and the deal hasn’t even been finalised yet, but barring a truly terrible disaster it’s as good as done and he’s been having his things boxed up.

There isn’t much _to_ box up. Ana by nature keeps a Spartan house, and after living so long in one place Bastian hadn’t had much of an idea how to start accumulating things. His house in Munich still holds all but the most essential of his possessions, and all he’s having sent to the United States is a bit of furniture and clothes. The rest he can buy over there.

It would feel wrong to empty his house in Munich. It would feel too much like a betrayal, when what’s happened here is just a detour.

For the past few weeks while the talks have been going on, Bastian has been feeling odd about the whole thing. There’s a difference between Manchester –a two hour flight across France and the Channel- and _Chicago,_ with not only France and the Channel but the Atlantic Ocean and a good amount of North America as well in between him and his first team debut, his first national team call-up, his first goal and trophy and everything that had gone into, well, everything.

It all seems very long ago and, watching the white-jerseyed players running about on the television screen, Bastian feels old. That is, until Lukas fires off a beautiful shot that curls into the top right corner of the net and is engulfed by a wave of team mates. Lukas’s left foot doesn’t seem to feel old, and neither does Lukas as he wheels away, arms outstretched and his face a picture of the same delight (albeit with a tinge of incredulity) it would wear when he was twenty and knocking them in with abandon.

 

 

\--

 

 

In Chicago Bastian feels the distance between them acutely. It’s like they’ve been moving steadily further and further away from each other since Lukas left Bayern.

They are just about opposite each other. Opposite each other in the most literal sense of the word. Bastian dreams, one night, that he sinks through his mattress, through the floor, right down to the centre of the Earth and then out again, to emerge on the street where Lukas lives. He dreams that he knocks on the door and Lukas answers it, wearing the old baggy training kit they used to have back when they were playing for the U21 squad, both trying to break into the national team.

Bastian doesn’t know what Lukas’ street looks like, in Japan, but he imagines it leafy and quiet. He hopes it’s leafy and quiet. Lukas likes an adventure, and he thrives on the new and exciting, but Bastian hopes his street is peaceful. Wide enough to comfortably ride a bicycle on and with a basketball hoop, so that Louis can continue showing up his dad when it comes to shooting perfect three-pointers.

The time difference means that they don’t catch each other too often, their schedules neat inverses, and they’re too old now for either of them to be awake late into the night texting nonsense like they used to do when they were younger, caught up in the excitement of their own glittering futures and each other. So instead Bastian wakes up to little updates from Lukas on life, the universe, and everything, and send his own missives back before bed when he knows Lukas is probably at training.

The majority of their lives together (because frankly by this point, it’s accurate to think in terms of lifetimes) has been spent over the phone. Bastian’s never been the type of person to grumble about technology and the modern world, but if he were he would always have to make the concession that if it weren’t for the mobile phone, he would have wasted away long ago for lack of Lukas constantly in his pocket, only a few seconds and however many cell towers and satellites away.

He always misses Lukas in at least a small way. Obviously he does. They’ve been too close friends for too long for him not to miss Lukas when he doesn’t see him, and they’ve never fallen out of contact. They had drifted somewhat, not on purpose but just in the way that happens when two people live far apart and only catch each other for a few days during the international call-ups that had been slowly becoming more sheer force of habit than anything else. And now no more.

Bastian finds himself putting more thought into his messages, aware that their allotment of time face to face, revelling in the simple fact of each others’ presences, has been cut down since retiring. Even those slivers of weeks tripping over each other in training and giggling behind their hands at whatever horrendous hair styles the younger kids are trying to confidently debut are over.

 

 

\--

 

 

The first time Bastian had ever laid eyes on Lukas Podolski, Lukas had had the worst haircut possibly in the entire history of humankind, and he had been fully aware of that fact. It had made him likeable and given Bastian easy opener to tease.

“Will you come visit me in Cologne?” Lukas had asked while they were packing up, that first glittering international week with the first team having drawn to a satisfactory close.

“Will you fix your hair so I can stand to look at you?”

“Ah, Schweini,” Lukas had said with an air of great wisdom, “this hair is only temporary. But you have to look like _that_ forever. I have to keep myself ugly so you don’t feel bad!”

It had been a patently ridiculous thing to say, since Lukas had already had his hair that way when they had first met. But it had felt right, to talk as though they had known each other for years instead of days. It had been as if Bastian could already feel the weight of what was to come, and he was ready for it.

 

 

\--

 

 

It’s not fair that after retiring, everything reminds Bastian of playing for Germany. Of course he’d known he would miss it. But it’s not as if the past few years he’s exactly been pulling up trees. And it’s definitely not fair that while the past few years have been in a comfortable stasis, once he and Lukas are on opposite ends of the planet, everything reminds Bastian of him.

It would probably be easier to stop missing Lukas if Lukas didn’t keep posting nonsense on his social media accounts: a tweet, a joke, a bad photoshop, just small hints here and there to suggest that he’s thinking about Bastian when he doesn’t need to be. It isn’t like Lukas will talk to him and only then post a smiling-emoji’d joke afterwards, these things would just come out of the blue and smack Bastian in the face with the fact that somewhere across the globe, someone was thinking about him.

Bastian’s always been overwhelmed by how generous Lukas is with him, right from when they were kids. He makes friends easily in general but Lukas had just slipped himself right under Bastian’s skin from day one, horrible haircut and all, and hadn’t let himself get dislodged by the intervening years. Even with the two of them being complete idiots for vast swathes of their lives, they’ve always managed to bounce along together without too much friction. It’s easy to make friends in football but it’s even easier to make the kind of vague, unimportant dislikes that don’t stop you from playing together or even from playing well together, but that inspires a kind of low-level constant annoyance. Bastian’s pretty sure he’s been irritating and moody and inconstant more than enough over the years, but he and Lukas have never fallen out in any sort of serious way.

Lukas has probably been irritating and moody and inconstant as well, but Bastian honestly can’t remember it. Why should he? It’s all far in the past and getting farther with every day that goes by.

 

 

\--

 

 

The first time Bastian had kissed Lukas had been right before Lukas had left Bayern. They hadn’t had a fight about it because there was no point in fighting.

“Are you trying to bribe me into staying?” Lukas had asked, a distinct quaver in his voice.

“Yes. No. A little bit?”

Lukas had kissed him back, a real kiss that meant something, and had left.

 

 

\--

 

 

“When are you going to hurry up and have kids?” Lukas complains while they’re on the phone on one of the rare occasions that their schedules line up. Bastian figures if they’ve earned anything, it’s the privilege to rack up more international phone charges than anyone in their right mind would ever consider. It’s their luxury to keep things the way they’ve always been, ever since they were twenty-somethings and a paltry few hundred kilometres apart.

Bastian laughs. “It’s not me you should be talking to. Do you want me to get Ana on the line and you can explain that question to her? She’s on the treadmill reading something hardcover and intimidating but I’m _sure_ she would make time to talk to you about family planning.”

“On second thought, I’ll let her make her own decisions,” says Lukas generously. “I wouldn’t want to rush you two.”

“What’s the big hurry about, anyway?”

“It’s no fair that you get to be an uncle to Louis and Maya and I don’t,” Lukas whines. “I want to be an uncle!”

“That makes no sense.”

“It does, too.” There’s the sound of dishes clinking as Lukas presumably rummages in a cabinet, making lunch. Bastian is in bed, about to go to sleep. “I was born to be a fun uncle.”

Bastian can’t argue that point. “Well, you should visit more. I haven’t been able to do any uncle-ing. Maya won’t even know who I am.”

“She knows who you are!” Lukas protests. “But you’re right. Which is why we need to move and be neighbours.”

“Neighbours.” Bastian is sceptical. This is a concept that Lukas has floated before, usually when he was a little bit drunk. At the moment he’s sober (as far as Bastian can tell) but here it is again.

“A nice double house with a beautiful shared back garden, with a trampoline and set of goalposts! And every morning we could wake up and say hello to each other at the front doors while collecting the post.” Lukas sounds supremely satisfied with himself. “We wouldn’t have to argue over whose house to go to for Christmas or Easter, and we could do movie nights every third Friday.”

Bastian thinks about it. There’s a distinctive appeal to what Lukas is saying but something petulant in him still wants to protest. Lukas’s rosy worldview can’t have _everything_ solved so easily. “Alright,” he says, “but where is this house supposed to be? Who gets to live in their city?”

“We compromise and live in Frankfurt,” says Lukas promptly.

Bastian makes a face. “Do you really want your kids growing up supporting _Frankfurt?_ ”

“My children are already mad for Kӧln. I’m good father.”

“Maya’s not even a year old!”

“I’m a _really_ good father. C’mon, location is unimportant. What _is_ important is that we’ve got a nice roof and a nice garden, and two little houses in between.”

“I would like that,” Bastian admits, letting himself sink down on the bed, chin tucked into his chest and the phone squashed against the pillow and his cheek. “We could have family dinners with all of us together.”

“I know, it would be amazing,” says Lukas smugly, and goes on to lovingly describe the layout of their hypothetical double house, and how Bastian is rich enough to have a helicopter take his kids to see Bayern on the weekend if he’s worried that his force of personality is weaker than the questionable appeals of _Frankfurt_.

The conversation is light but after hanging up Bastian feels uneasily, and dreams that night that when he sinks through the Earth he just falls out the other side. Lukas’s street doesn’t catch him and he just drops off into space and keeps spiralling away.

 

 

\--

 

 

After 2012 and coming _so close_ again, Lukas had kissed him and kissed him and told him in between kisses _next time. Next time, Basti._

“How do you know?!” Bastian had shouted, shoving him away and so angry that it was so easy for Lukas to say something like ‘next time’ and sound like he actually believed it. “You can’t know that, Lukas! You can’t know anything!”

Lukas hadn’t given him a proper answer, only kissed Bastian again like that somehow explained anything. In a way it did, because when Philipp lifted the World Cup trophy two years later and Bastian cried into the front of Lukas’s shirt like he was intending on drowning them all, Lukas only laughed and laughed and laughed.

 

 

\--

 

 

When he wakes up Lukas has, at some point while he was asleep, tweeted a picture of two old men with his and Bastian’s heads crookedly photoshopped on. First it startles a laugh out of Bastian, sort of a fond exasperated snort because it’s exactly the kind of dumb joke that Lukas would have lovingly crafted in between training and dinner for Bastian’s benefit, and then it provokes the scientific realisation of the century by reminding Bastian that the world is round.

This whole time! This whole time he’s been thinking about it in terms of him and Lukas slowly pulling away from each other, fleeing to the edges of the globe, but he’s an idiot because the globe doesn’t _have_ edges, that’s why it’s the _globe-_

What if they aren’t moving farther away from each other, but towards each other the other way around. What if they aren’t ending things day by day but just beginning new things?

Bastian feels like a cheesy greeting card but he’s also the most relieved he’s been in weeks. Lukas can have his shared back garden and his family dinners because they haven’t been running to the end of their rope at all.

Lukas picks up the phone even though it’s past midnight and he should really be getting his sleep. He’s a growing boy. “What’s up?”

“Lukas,” Bastian says, trying for something that he’s not entirely sure of.

“Bastian.” Lukas replies with mock solemnity.

He could probably say something really meaningful here. Something about how he’s only just gotten over this sad and difficult thing that has been stuck in his chest since retiring and which has only now begun to dissolve slowly. But there’s also a definite upside to just getting to the point. “Do you want to come to the World Cup with me?”

Lukas laughs, delighted. “Basti, are you asking me out on a date?”

“Are you _agreeing_ to go on a date?”

“Of course!” Lukas sounds giddy. “We’ve gone to the past six international tournaments together! It would be bad luck to break the streak!”

“Not everything has to be different just because we’re old and decrepit now.”

Lukas lets out a huff of surprised breath in a static-y rush over the line. “That’s what I’ve been saying!” The grin is clear in his voice. “So, are you going to start looking at real estate?”

Bastian laughs a little bit helplessly and tightens his grip on his mobile phone. “You’re really serious about that.”

“Yeah!” Lukas’s voice goes soft. “Well, okay. But I just think, we’ve spent too much time too far apart. The universe owes us some quality proximity. So at the very least, we should buy a holiday home together.”

“Where, Helgoland?”

Bastian can _hear_ the face that Lukas makes. “I was thinking more like Malta, ai yi yi Bastian. You _are_ an old man.”

Not for the first time nor very likely the last, Bastian feels every single centimetre of the distance from Chicago to Kobe. If Lukas were _here_ instead of _there_ , Bastian would just want to put his hands on Lukas’s shoulders and make sure he stayed put. He would just want to line kisses along Lukas’s neck down the curve of his spine, one kiss for every hour between them.

“I miss you,” Bastian says, and then adds impulsively, “can we have a swimming pool for our house?”

And Lukas only laughs and laughs and laughs.

 

 


End file.
